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The report provides new analysis and recommendations from across the region (Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, Mauritania).
Produced by the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report at UNESCO in partnership with the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), the second report, Learning Counts, in a Spotlight series focusing on foundational numeracy in Africa shows that teachers will struggle to effectively translate the curriculum into action in the classroom if there is a lack of support to address their knowledge gaps and their adverse classroom conditions, for example through easy to use teacher guides.
Manos Antoninis, Director of the GEM Report, said: “Teachers are set up to fail if they do not have the right materials to teach what is expected of them. We would not send a doctor without a stethoscope, for instance. Why should we assume teachers can teach without relevant, up to date teaching materials in appropriate languages. Without these, we are effectively turning teachers into interpreters and translators on top of their day job.”
The report will be launched at the 2024 Conference of the Africa Federation of Teaching Regulatory Authorities, at a session hosted by H.E Douglas Munsaka Syakalima, Minister of Education, Zambia.
The latest out-of-school and completion statistics are compiled to show the challenge that countries face every day. For every 100 children in Africa, 18 children are out of school– twice the rate of the rest of the world. However, there is sign of improvement, with completion rates growing at a steady pace of almost one percentage point per year throughout the past 20 years.
In addition, learning rates at the end of primary have improved faster in Africa than the rest of the world since 2011, although the challenge remains notable, with at most one in five children attaining minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics at the end of primary school today.
Having up to date and relevant textbooks is critical. Yet the report found that textbooks are often out-of-date and in the wrong language. Textbooks arrived eight years after the lower primary curriculum in Uganda, and 9 to 12 years later in South Africa, for instance. In Niger and Mauritania, teachers are using textbooks and teacher guides that are a decade or more older than the new curriculum. Textbooks were not in the language of instruction for 80% of students in Zambia and in less than half of classrooms visited for the report in Uganda.
Textbooks and teacher guides may not be fully aligned with the curriculum. In Niger, textbooks and teacher guides include statistics and probability but the curriculum does not. Assessments are also sometimes found to depart fromthe curriculum. Mauritania’s assessed Algebra, which is not part of the curriculum, for example. South Africa classroom assessment also only covers two out of five learning domains.  
Teacher guides and lesson plans can help teachers follow curriculum objectives, but appear to be used inconsistently, which calls for a review of their design. Research for the report found that around three in five teachers in South Africa and Uganda and more than four in five in Mauritania and Zambia had a teacher guide, although shortages or delays in provision were often noted.
Ongoing professional training is also important to improve teachers’ subject knowledge and refresh their qualifications, which the report shows technology is helping with. In Africa, 17% of countries require a bachelor’s degree to teach in comparison to 62% of countries globally, while teachers’ qualifications are also often lower than requirements. The importance of training is highlighted in the report. Among surveyed primary school teachers in the 14 countries in the 2019 PASEC, only 35% mastered basic procedures in mathematics. Differences in teacher subject knowledge accounts for more than one third of the cross-country variation in student achievement.
Education is dropping down the list of governments’ priorities despite there being an annual financing gap of USD 28 billion to achieve countries’ own targets to achieve 85% primary completion rate by 2030. External financing is meanwhile declining as a source of revenue for governments, and less likely to support foundational learning as to support secondary education.   
The report recommends the following:
1. Give all children a textbook – and all teachers a guide. Ensure that all children and teachers have teaching and learning materials that are research-based, aligned with the curriculum, and locally developed.
2. Teach all children in their home language – and train teachers accordingly. Give all children the opportunity to first learn to read in a language they understand and all teachers the confidence to support them.
3. Provide all children with a school meal. Give all children the minimum conditions to learn at school.
At the system level
4.
Make a clear plan to improve learning.
a.
Develop a common continental framework to monitoring
learning outcomes.
b.
Establish
clear learning standards and align assessments to evaluate how well students meet them.
c.
Focus on developing basic skills early to support advanced cognitive abilities
later on.
5.
Develop teacher capacity. Ensure
all teachers use classroom time effectively through cost-effective training.
6. Prepare instructional leaders. Restructure support mechanisms offered to teachers and schools.
At the continental level
7.
Learn from peers. Reinvigorate
mechanisms allowing countries to share experiences on foundational literacy and numeracy.
At the international level
8.
Focus aid on institution building. Shift
from projects to provision of public goods that support foundational learning.
Download the report: https://bit.ly/2024-spotlight
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